Four people are killed in motor vehicle accidents in the US every hour. Based on 2007 information from the National Association of Commissioners of Insurance and 2008 information from the United States Department of Transportation (DOT), the cost of vehicle insurance in the US in 2008 was $201 billion.
Consumer Reports magazine in 2012 reported an additional $99 billion dollars in medical costs and lost time due to vehicle accidents every year in the US.
Thus, the cost of vehicle accidents in the US is approximately $300 billion per year. This is approximately $1000 for every US resident every year.
Various technology-based methods have been proposed to reduce the number of vehicle accidents. The basis of some of these methods is wireless transmission by a sending vehicle of its position and speed, then the computation by a receiving vehicle of a possible collision between the transmitting vehicle and the receiving vehicle by computing the future positions of both vehicle based on the received information combined with the position and speed information of the receiving vehicle. Then, either the driver of the receiving vehicle is warned to take evasive action or evasive action is initiated by the receiving vehicle automatically.
Such systems are sometimes called “V2V” for Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication.
V2V systems have been deployed on a limited basis for commercial trucks and pilot tests have been performed on automobiles. However, such systems are not in widespread use, nor is widespread use being implemented or planned. A collision detection system for ships is currently widely used, called Automatic Identification System, or AIS
A standard has been developed and adopted for V2V communication by IEEE: IEEE 802.11p. This is not the protocol used by AIS.
These systems as proposed and developed suffer from serious weaknesses. One weakness is unnecessary complexity.
Another serious weakness of V2V systems as proposed is the use of an inappropriate, non-deterministic basis for message transmission. Real-time systems, particularly those related to safety, as is V2V by its very definition, require deterministic, consistent delivery of information. The systems as proposed use non-deterministic, “random back-off” transmission of messages, such as CSMA/CA. Such non-deterministic systems were designed for, and are appropriate for, non-real time applications such as loading web pages and sending text messages.
Yet another serious weakness of V2V systems as proposed is lack of a simple, usable priority system that is integrated with bandwidth allocation. Priority of messages is important to assure that the most important messages get through while the least priority messages are delayed or dropped.
Yet another serious weakness of V2V systems as proposed is lack of clear distinction between emergency vehicle messages and non-emergency vehicle messages.
Yet another serious weakness of V2V systems as proposed is lack of clear bandwidth allocation rules separating safety-related messages from non-safety related messages.
Yet another serious weakness of V2V systems as proposed is a lack of ability to practically include pedestrians and bicycles in the system.
Yet another serious weakness of V2V systems as proposed is a lack of ability to take advantage of widely popular personal, mobile electronic devices to increase the installed penetration rate.
Yet another serious weakness of V2V systems as proposed is lack of a complete application layer protocol, such as message formats and meanings. Without this specification there is no compatibility between different manufacturers or implementations.
A weakness of AIS is that it is too slow for V2V use.